local governments and administrations are empowered to increase, within the limits of their respective budget allotments, the rate of the authorised rewards whenever such a measure is considered desirable; but rewards should only be given for killing destructive, and not merely wild, animals.

All over India the authorities concur that the evil is great and needs remedy. Various rewards are offered in different localities, full price being given for adult animals, half, or less, for cubs. Some think the rewards should be continued, others that they should be given up or offered only in special cases. Some think them too high, others too low; a variety of opinions exist as to modes of dealing with the evil, but even the independent States, such as the Nizam's and Jeypore, have proclaimed rewards for the destruction of noxious animals. It cannot be said that the subject has been ignored. The question is how best to carry on the war against these creatures. What is needed is a system laid down on general principles for the whole country, to be carried out in detail according to the requirements of each particular district. There should be a Department, with a responsible chief and subordinate agents, for whom certain rules should be laid down, to be carried out steadily and perseveringly, whilst leaving much to the discretion of the local authorities, who should be enjoined to give encouragement to those who are entrusted with the duty of destroying the wild animals, but insisting on the work being carried on uniformly everywhere. Ample means exist if sought for, for constituting such a Department, and if it were entrusted to a selected officer, as in the case of the Dacoity and Thuggie Departments, it is probable that in a few years the result would be as good in respect of noxious animals as it has been in respect of thugs and dacoits.

J. FAYRER.

THE WORKS OF HENRIK IBSEN.

HENRIK IBSEN is a solitary man. For twenty-five years he has lived in self-imposed exile from his native country of Norway. No lands. call him master; no household calls him its head. In his wanderings over Europe he goes into no society, and in his many temporary abodes he takes nothing with him that he calls his own. A friend charged with messages to him in Rome could only find him after much patient searching, and though well known to many by sight he has no intimate friends.

I live to myself (he says), without friends. Friends are a costly indulgence; they lay on us obligations of speech or silence, like parties in politics. I believe in no such obligations. I belong to no party and wish to belong to none. I will sacrifice my feelings to the claims of no organised mass, be it Party, Society, or State. From our early youth we are all brought up to be citizens instead of human beings; but we belong in reality to humanity rather than to the State. The expression of our own individuality is our first duty, not its subordination to the interests of the community. I, at least, have no talents as a citizen, the leader of a school, or a member of a party; and there must be thousands like me.

Up to the age of thirty-six Ibsen lived as an ordinary member of society: he is now nearly sixty-two. The first part of his life was not happy. His father became insolvent when Henrik was a child of eight years old, and his early youth was clouded with extreme poverty. His first start in life was made at the age of sixteen as a chemist's apprentice: it was not a soothing career for a fiery and discontented youth. He wrote a tragedy in his hours of leisure and had it printed pseudonymously at his own expense. It was on the subject of Catilina. He came to be glad to sell the edition for what it would fetch as waste paper, and to buy a dinner with the proceeds. He always looked forward to going to the University, but Christiania did not greatly please him when at last he got there. He read hard, but not for any course in particular, and when Ole Bull, the violinist, offered him a post in his new theatre at Bergen he gladly took it. He was there for five years. In 1857 he married Susanna Thoresen, whose mother was a Norwegian authoress of note, and settled in Christiania with a post in the theatre similar to the one he had held in Bergen. In 1864 he left Norway. His life, uneventful up till then, has remained for the outside world, and apart from his work, equally unevent

ful down to the present day. But his life cannot be separated from his labours. His writings are his life. They are not conjecturally autobiographic, but literally and designedly so.

Everything that I have written (he says) is most intimately connected with what I have experienced or have not experienced. Each new poem has served for me the purpose of purifying and enlightening the mind; for one is never without a certain share in and responsibility towards the society to which one belongs. This is what made me write the following lines :

At leve er Krig met Trolde

Hjertets og Hjernens Hvälv;
At digte det er at holde
Dommedag over sig sälv.1

It is not surprising to find that a man with so grave-one may almost say, so grim—a view of his own genius seeks for solitude not from choice, but from necessity.

When I am writing (he says) I must be alone; if I have the eight characters of a drama to do with I have society enough; they keep me busy: I must learn to know them. And this process of making their acquaintance is slow and painful. I make, as a rule, three casts of my dramas, which differ considerably from each other. I mean in characteristics, not in the course of the treatment. When I first settle down to work out my material I feel as if I had got to know my characters on a railway journey; the first acquaintance is struck up, and we have chatted about this and that. When I write it down again I already see everything much more clearly, and I know the people as I should if I had stayed with them for a month at a watering-place. I have grasped the leading points of their characters and their little peculiarities, but I might yet make a mistake in important points. At last, in the final cast, I have reached the boundary of my acquaintances: I know my people from close and lasting intercourse; they are my trusted friends, who have no surprises in store for me; as I see them now so shall I always see them.

His work shows the results of this painful and laborious devotion. His characters are creations: they could not, at any turn of the play, do anything but what Ibsen records of them. They are living creatures. Again:

My starting-point (he says) is a certain idea struggling into shape; whether the idea be clothed in modern or historic dress is at bottom quite indifferent to me; just at present modern life is nearer to me, as in my younger years were the historic times. The result is often essentially different from the idea; my starting-point and my finish are not the same, any more than are dreams and realities. Suppose you had read and heard a great deal about a certain town, and at last you stood before it; well, just as the impression you brought with you changes into the reality when seen with unclouded vision, just as the reality dominates the dream, so the poem-which is for me the reality-dominates the vague and wavering idea that at first filled me. But in after days, when I can calmly gaze on my work, I see the connection between my poem and my life, that was invisible to me before; and the whole drama only appears to me as a moment in my spiritual develop

ment.

Life is a war with spirits

In the vault of heart and brain,
And writing poetry is but to hold
The judgment day over one's self.

'He labours very slowly, writes and rewrites his works until they appear in a neat-looking manuscript without a single correction, each page as smooth and firm as a marble plate, on which the tooth of time can leave no impression.'

Ibsen was not a precocious genius. He began writing early, it is true, but he wrote to order-one play a year-for the stage. At first he wrote also, in his own words, 'in the spirit of the romantic past.' This period may be said to have lasted down to 1864, when he produced the Rival Princes.2 The Rival Princes, written in 1864, is founded on an episode in Norwegian history of the thirteenth century. Sverre, an adventurer not of the royal blood, had fought his way to the crown and reigned from 1184 to 1202. At his death a long struggle for the succession began, the chief aspirants being Hakon and Skule. In the opening scene the former is chosen king by the ordeal of fire. He reigns in friendship with his rival, whose daughter he marries. But Skule is restless while Hakon reigns. He feels himself as good a man as the king, and yet he lacks the kingly strength and the confidence which the ordeal by fire has given Hakon. Of the two conflicting impulses, his reverence for the God-elected and his own burning ambition, his ambition finally wins. He rebels and makes himself king, but reigns only a very short time, overborne by his stronger rival. The last scene is extremely dramatic. Skule with his son are besieged in a church, surrounded by the populace in arms against them. The king is rapidly drawing near. There is no escape. Skule has long felt his doom approaching, and now in a short prayer he offers his life to God as an atonement for his sins, and walks out to death with his son Peter. The doors close behind them and reopen only to admit Hakon over Skule's body.

The Rival Princes is not really an historic drama at all. The characters are historic, but their treatment is entirely modern. Skule is a modern man habited as a viking. As Brandes has observed,' the psychological interest completely routs the historic.'

Towards the end of the year 1863 Ibsen's friends succeeded in obtaining for him a pension of 2,700 marks. He at once left Norway and travelled to Rome, where he settled, and proceeded in solitude to write the principal works of his second period. These are lyric dramas in rhyming verses. Properly speaking the Comedy of Love belongs to this period, although it was produced in 1862. The two masterpieces of this time are Brand, written in 1866, and Peer Gynt, written in 1867.

In the first of these Ibsen incarnated his own fiery zeal for right, and discontent with half-measures, in the character of a Norwegian priest. Brand is a man of heroic mould, knowing only duty, and married to a wife of fine temper and resolution. His lot is cast in a cure deep in a Norwegian valley. The villagers are dull, selfish * Ibsen's title is Kongs-Emnerne, which may be rendered 'Kings-Stuff.'

clods, narrow and undiscerning, and they as little prize Brand's presence among them as such a society might be expected to do. However, his lot being cast among them, he must stop there and do his duty, which he accordingly does, at no less expense than the life of his wife and child, killed by the unwholesome air. His considerable fortune he devotes to building a church, and only when he has given up for the sake of his cure and his duty all that makes life worth living to him does he turn on his ungrateful congregation and denounce them from the church steps for their sloth and indifferHe then flees to the mountains, and dies there.

ence.

Brand is a man astray in this age. The Roman communion could perhaps still find him work, and in the great age of the Church he would have been a shining light; but a more tragic pouring of new wine into old bottles was never painted than when Ibsen created this fiery, zealous priest and chained him in a Norwegian mountain parish in the Protestant communion. Some misconception has arisen about the leading character in this play. In making him a priest Ibsen did not intend any criticism on any form of religious belief. In his own words, 'it would have been just as possible for me to apply the same syllogism to a sculptor or to a politician.'

Peer Gynt is the Norwegian Faust. It has been called 'a convulsive flight of fancy.' Peer Gynt is the incarnation of the ignoble, just as Brand is of the heroic, of our days. He is an elaborate satire on the Norwegian society of to-day and one of Ibsen's most popular characters in his own country. He is first introduced as a wild lad, who is not very good-tempered and plays practical jokes. For one of the latter he has to flee his native village and live in the mountains. He has all sorts of supernatural adventures, each one of which is made the subject of a fresh satire, and finally escapes to America. There he makes a large fortune in trade, chiefly in Bibles, rum, slaves, and gods. The fourth act discovers him in middle life prosperous and thoroughly repulsive. He loses his first fortune, has wonderful experiences in Africa, where he is hailed as a prophet, makes another fortune in California, returns to Norway, but loses his fortune in a shipwreck, and lands only to die in the arms of an old woman who loved him when they were boy and girl together and has loved him faithfully to the end.

In 1869 he produced the League of Youth, and then he entered on a period of eight years during which he wrote only one drama. This is an unusually long interval between two of his productions, and it occurs at a very important point in his life. After his Roman period he travelled. He was present at the opening of the Suez Canal, and then for some years settled at Dresden. When at Rome he had been struck-like Schiller seventy years before-with the figure of Julian the Apostate, and had made many historic and archæological studies with the view of dramatising his life. The